TrustYou, a provider of social media monitoring and semantic technologies for the online reviews and social commerce space, announced today a $5 million Series A round and the acquisition of Dallas-based competitor ReviewAnalyst.

The round, led by Credit Agricole Private Equity, will expand worldwide operations and bring its advanced sentiment search platform for the hotel, restaurant, and travel industries to the United States. The acquisition of ReviewAnalyst brings the total number of customers on the TrustYou platform to more than 6,000 globally, including, Hard Rock Cafes, Best Western Hotels, Omni Hotels & Resorts, and Starwood Hotels. In addition, businesses using the API reach more than 5 million consumers monthly with review summaries and the TrustYou Global Review Score.

"Social media is very important to us as an engagement platform with guests, which also enables us to find out how they feel and what they are saying about us, influencing our brand and our revenues," said Kerry Kennedy, vice president of e-commerce at Omni Hotels & Resorts. "We need a robust review tool that provides us with knowledge of what our guests are saying about our brand and our competitors. The new combination of TrustYou and ReviewAnalyst gives us these insights in a single snapshot."

The TrustYou platform monitors, in 10 different languages, all of the world's top travel review and social media sites, including Facebook, Foursquare, Google Places, TripAdvisor, Twitter, Yelp and blogs, for user-generated content pertaining to particular hotels and restaurants. The platform aggregates, structures, and reports opinions found in online reviews, comments, and posts and creates a comprehensive Global Review Score. TrustYou also offers a range of application programming interfaces (APIs) allowing travel companies and review sites to build on top of the TrustYou platform.

"As a profitable company, with millions of consumers and thousands of hospitality industry customers leveraging our data daily, the acquisition of our a long-term partner and U.S. market leader aggressively changes the social commerce landscape," explained Benjamin Jost, CEO and co-founder of TrustYou. "We saw a clear gap in the market where both consumers and businesses were losing faith in reviews and ratings. With TrustYou data we take the inaccuracy and guesswork out of online reviews and bring them to a level that everyone can trust."